Last 365 days, we celebrated the summer season solstice as Salad Days, with sparkling lettuce from our garden. This 12 months, but, our lettuce crop has been a piece of a unhappiness. Our first planting of Tom Thumb Baby Bibb lettuce did no longer rise up at all, and the later plantings have not yet produced any heads big sufficient to consume. The Summer Lettuce Mix we were given from Fedco has been a piece more efficient, however we didn't plant as a fantastic deal of it, so we've got now not were given very tons in the garden it is ready to eat. The snow peas are generating, however like very last year's, they're coming in only a few at a time?No longer sufficient to eat all via themselves. And the asparagus has petered out almost truely.
Fortunately, our Gardeners' Holiday wasn't a whole bust, way to a coworker of Brian's who went on tour and supplied us her CSA proportion for the week. We picked up the box this morning and determined a cornucopia of glowing produce: a pint of blueberries, a massive head of lettuce, a group of beets whole with greens, some fresh inexperienced beans, a few garlic stems, and a big bunch of a few type of darkish, flat leaves that we couldn't exactly perceive. Kale? Chard? Something that we do not broaden ourselves, at any charge.
Since they were absolutely leafy veggies, but, it stood to cause that that they had artwork in location of different leafy vegetables in the recipes we knew. So Brian honestly substituted them for the spinach in Garlic, Chick-pea and Spinach Soup (the same recipe he tailored for this month's Recipe of the Month). These big vegetables, whatever they were, did no longer prepare dinner dinner down almost as a good deal due to the fact the spinach generally does, resulting in a soup that have become a brilliant deal greener to study, but its flavor changed into greater or less unchanged. By the time you add in all the ones other flavors?Chick peas, cumin, tahini?The spinach does no longer sincerely dominate the recipe. And, for the reason that our veggie bin changed into complete to bursting with all this bounty and we had to use some of it as plenty as make room, he went in advance and used the garlic stems inside the soup as properly, in area of the usual garlic cloves. With a salad on the aspect, we had three exquisite types of seasonal produce in a single meal.
So we loved our percentage (or alternatively, Brian's coworker's share) of sparkling summer season produce in recent times, however none of it have become absolutely from our lawn. Fortunately, dessert will provide a treatment for that. Brian volunteered to bake a pie for some website traffic they're having the following day at his workplace, and thinking about the fact that we had hundreds of rhubarb, he went in advance and made a further little pie for us to enjoy this night time. The massive pie definitely would not consist of any of our very very own home-grown rhubarb; it's made from the very last of the bunch we picked up on the Hopewell yard income in 2013 and have had stashed in our freezer for the beyond 12 months. In the smaller pie, however, he supplemented that frozen rhubarb with a bit little bit of our personal, so we get to enjoy at least a touch flavor of domestic-grown produce for our solstice banquet.
Fortunately, severa exceptional plants in our garden, which include the green beans and zucchini, are looking very green and healthy, showing promise of precise production. So by the time we get to our subsequent Gardeners' Holiday, in August, we want to be capable of celebrate with our own domestic-grown produce all yet again.
